Imeem

imeem logo

imeem is a social media service where users interact with each other by watching, posting, and sharing content of all media types, including blogs, photos, audio, and video. Launched in October 2004, the service has both a social network structure as well as a content browsing/filtering structure similar to that of Flickr and YouTube. It works on an advertising based business model, and is therefore free to use.

Features

Visitors to the site may access music, video, photographs, blog posts and polls; however, commenting, rating, tagging and the posting of new content requires a user to register an account. A key feature promoted by imeem is the media playlist where content posted from multiple sources may be collected into a playlist which itself may be published for comments, tags and rating. Playlists can consist of videos, music or images, with the recent introduction of the 'Remix Player' music and images may be combined into a single presentation with customizable image transition effects. Several websites have since imitated the playlist feature, either adding it to an existing media player widget (e.g. Youtube) or building their entire service around the idea (ProjectPlaylist).

imeem provides a number of mechanisms to make content available to audiences outside of the site through RSS syndication and embedding content into external sites. However, since February 2007 MySpace has been taking steps to limit the posting of imeem content on its site: any updates or comments have the word 'imeem' removed upon posting, making it impossible to even mention the site.

imeem used to require a software client, to support its distributed database model and provide features such as instant messaging and file sharing. However, this has since been phased out, and the site has been entirely web based since June 2007.

imeem links users through topic groups which were originally called "meems", relating to common interests. Media content can exist in custom profile pages and topic groups (called "meems", from the word "meme"), as well as in browsable content channels and charts. Meems can serve as online communities for artists, bands, clubs, films, schools, festivals, concert tours, friends, and sports enthusiasts. However a recent redesign of the site has renamed most of the references to the word "meem" with "group", presumably this is an attempt to reduce user confusion over the word. Formerly, it was possible for links to be made between groups which had related subject matters. However, this linking feature was only ever implemented on the client, and it is no longer possible to add or remove links with the website - the links are still visible on older groups, and officially created groups appear to have links added at creation time.

History

The service has changed drastically since its original inception. When it first launched the client was the primary platform, the website merely existed as a means for users to register and download the client. The original service was billed as a 'distributed, peer-to-peer, social network' every client on the network had a database, which would accelerate access to content deemed to be close to the user. The database would also generate and store references to media content shared on the network, if a user shared photos or a podcast then the data would only exist on the client database network, users who wanted to view the content would access it by peering directly with the publisher.

While this distributed model was interesting it proved to be difficult to attract many users since the only way to participate was to download the imeem client software. The application proved to be something of a resource hog for power users since the database could grow to quite large proportions just by associating with a few individuals who were sharing a lot of content.

Over time more features have been added to the website and now the client software is no longer functional and the innovative distributed database model has been centralized. Now that all of imeem's features are available without requiring a client download the service has rapidly grown in popularity, in particular with classes of user who have traditionally found themselves on the other side of the digital divide.. According to comscore web traffic statistics imeem.com was the fastest growing social site from October 2006-2007 with its usage rising almost 1600%.

On January 28th 2008 imeem announced that it was acquiring the music locker service anywhere.fm.

Copyright

In terms of content privacy and editing, imeem abides by a user participation model and maintains a set of community guidelines, user flagging of inappropriate content, and a notice-and-takedown policy.

imeem's user agreement requires users to respect copyright law, and is not responsible for any infringing activities in accordance with the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act,1998.

Warner Music Group Corp. announced on July 12, 2007 that it had settled its copyright infringement lawsuit against imeem by agreeing to license its music and video content to the site for a slice of its ad revenue. Financial details of the settlement were not disclosed. Under the agreement, imeem Inc. can carry music and videos from all of the record company's artists, who include Madonna, Linkin Park and Red Hot Chilli Peppers.

On September 26th, 2007 it was revealed that imeem had negotiated a deal with Sony/BMG music, furthermore the same story reported that imeem was in negotiations with both EMI and Vivendi Universal. A month later imeem announced a deal with EMI music to allow their music to be freely available on the site, with one notable exception, the catalogue of The Beatles remains unavailable to any digital distribution. In December 2007 imeem completed its 'Royal Flush' of major labels when it signed a deal with Vivendi Universal, again the terms of the deal are secret, but it is presumed that users of the site can now legally share music from Universal's extensive catalogue.

If imeem determines that the legal copyright owner of an uploaded track is a record label which does not have a deal with imeem the track will be reduced to a 30 second sample when anyone except the original uploader attempts to listen to the track. When a 30 second version of a track is encountered the user is presented with links to purchase the track from music retail sites including Amazon.com and iTunes.

Privacy

imeem's initial press releases hailed it as "providing a possible solution to the privacy problem" of social networking. This perhaps remains to be seen. imeem's popularity is increasing rapidly, but it has been proposed that this is due to its "laissez-faire attitude towards copyright issues". Perhaps in response to these allegations imeem has recently announced a partnership with Snocap which provides audio fingerprinting and licensing technologies.

Groups are either public or private, private groups are invite only and not visible to non members, private groups are more limited than public groups since you cannot upload multimedia files, only images are allowed. User profile information allows privacy levels to be set individually on each piece of information, so a user's first name may be public but their last name may be more protected.

The 3 levels of privacy are:

• Myself
• My friends
• The Internet (web publishable)

Client Security (Historical)

• The original imeem client was designed from the ground up with security in mind
• The imeem client conducts most of its network activity using an encrypted protocol, making it difficult to monitor user activity.
• Conversations via imeems IM functionality and group chats are encrypted and only visible to conversation participants.
• On startup the application validates with a central server. This ensures that unauthorized clients cannot connect and run malicious exploits (such as monitoring traffic or spoofing identities) against the network.
• Software updates are also delivered via the client and authenticated before they are installed.
• Server-side configurations disable user's ability to use 3rd Party Programs (Such as Rich Media Downloaders for downloading media linked outside of the flash file) to download any imeem User Uploads.

The website obviously lacks many of the security features of the client, and since the majority of the content is now delivered from the website many of the original security features are no longer applicable outside the basic chat and file sharing features available on the client.

imeem Technology

imeem is primarily written in C# which allows the same code to execute under Microsoft's .Net and the open source Mono environments, this has allowed imeem to use both Windows and Linux based servers to run the service and website and as a result imeem developers have had an active role in developing Mono by reporting problems and contributing patches to the project.

For a time imeem supported a version of imeem for Mac OS X using mono coupled with a library christened 'Dumbarton' which bridges data and methods between Objective C and Mono. The name of the library references the Dumbarton Bridge, the crossing of which has a dismal reputation due to pungent salt marshes alongside the span; as such the name "Dumbarton" serves as a suitable analogy for crossing between the two language environments. This library has been released under the LGPL as an alternative to Cocoa# and can be downloaded from the imeem site, although the imeem client for Mac is no longer available

The website heavily uses AJAX and Flash to deliver the content and allow users to access it. Video and audio are both encoded as FLV files, audio is delivered as 128kbit CD quality MP3 data. Video is encoded to mp3 audio at 96kbit and Sorenson video at > 700kbit with resolution resized to 400 pixels wide and preserving its aspect ratio. While the video quality and resolution is significantly better than other video sites (youtube uses 300kbit video) the video sharing aspect of imeem has been largely eclipsed by the audio sharing component.

Trivia

• The primary port used by the imeem client and servers is 1729. This number has special significance as the Hardy-Ramanujan number and a Carmichael number. The client also uses 2465 as a preferred port for UDP traffic, which is also a Carmichael number.

• "Imeem" in Russian means "[we are] having".

• The name "imeem" originally came from the combination of IM and meme, referring to their original client design.

• Professional basketball player Kevin Durant has said imeem is one of his favorite sites.

• In August 2007, imeem was cited in PC Magazine's List of 'Top Undiscovered Websites'

• The first use of imeem's poll feature asked users 'Did Joe Break imeem'. Joe is one of the programmers at imeem.

• imeem was the first site on the internet to host fully licensed and legal videos from the classic rock band Led Zeppelin

External links

• imeem official website
• PRN Newswire